Reddit reviews Siam Mapped: A History of the Geo-Body of a Nation

you get 10,000 points for "Sightseeing"!

I can't think of too much fiction... The Windup Girl is an excellent book, but the Thai setting feels a little cringey and forced. It doesn't ruin the book but it doesn't have to be in Thailand either.

Three non-fiction books I think are essential for anyone who hates being clueless:

• Very Thai explains a lot of minutiae about life in Thailand that you probably won't figure out on your own. I wish it were easier to find here, but it's worth buying if you ever see.
  
• Siam Mapped by Thongchai Winichakul explains how modern Thailand and the concept of "Thainess" came to be. It's by a famous Thai academic, but was originally written in English because there's a little too much hard truth in it.
  
• The Art of Not Being Governed by James C. Scott explains the fuck out of hill tribes. I don't think any book has colored my understanding of anything quite like that one. It's full of boring, skippable parts but there are some insights about Southeast Asia I don't think you can gain elsewhere.
  
  edit: I remember an awesome hilarious collection of anecdotes/essays by a prototypical farang sexpat in the late 40s but I forget what it's called, I'll look for it tomorrow
  
  edit #2: Lonely Planet's "World Food Thailand" is also excellent and well-researched
  
  edit #3: "Letters from Thailand" is interesting too, it's about a boy who immigrates to Bangkok from southern China in the 1940s and it follows the rest of his life in Thailand.

> Issan showed they can burn down parts of the capital

Can you explain this? As far as I'm aware there's no evidence that anybody who burned down those buildings was from Isaan, nor that Isaan (the biggest part of Thailand) should in any way be blamed for it. That's like saying "Muslims did 9/11".

> We need better than Time.com to explain Issan to us. Anybody know better sources?

Well, the article is mostly paraphrasing David Streckfuss, so you could start there. It also links to this book by Charles Keyes, which I haven't read but looks interesting. Keyes talks a bit more generally about rural cosmopolitanism vs entrenched middle class in Asia in this interview.

Thongchai Winichakul has written extensively on Thai national identity and internal geopolitics since the 70s. His book Siam Mapped (originally written in English) is pretty much required reading for anyone who wants to understand how Isaan became a part of Thailand and, more generally, Thailand's "unique situation" beyond what you hear on the news and from crazies on the internet like me.

"But panomyong," I hear you say, "I googled Keyes, Streckfuss and Thongchai and they're all anti-coup/pro-red shirt! Why don't you link some balanced sources?" (somebody is going to say it so I'll just type this up now)

The answer is that they're aren't any and there's a very clear cut (but complex!) reason why. In a broad sense, Thai history is caught between two competing and irreconcilable narratives - the official one that is taught in schools and views Thailand as exceptional, and the one everyone else believes that looks at Thailand within the framework of the rest of the world. To accept one is to reject wholesale the other because they have almost nothing in common and the first relies on verifiable falsehoods.

The first views Thailand as modernizing the people of Isaan and bringing them into the warm embrace of Thainess, the second sees Isaan as an ethnically distinct region that has been continually exploited by different kingdoms throughout history. To accept the first requires a Thai nationalist view of history, to accept the second requires the opposite and never the two shall meet. You don't want to read the nationalist stuff about Isaan, it's boring and wrong.

You've probably figured out where I'm going with this, but rejecting the nationalist version of history usually means rejecting the coup and its justifications which means that you get called a red shirt and a Thaksin-lover. That is purely a result of propaganda conditioning - these guys have been saying the same things for decades. For example, you might read this article by Thongchai and think "thaksin lover!!" (I think somebody actually described him as a 'red shirt academic' when that was posted) but he wrote Siam Mapped in 1988 and it's exactly the same stuff. If you read some opinion pieces from the 1973-76 liberalization (they're all in Thai and I don't even know how you'd find them) you'd probably start wondering if Thaksin could time travel.